Under the Cov­er: Sarah Madden

Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice is a sun-blissed par­ty movie that has fresh­ly mixed cock­tails flow­ing through its blood­stream – until it’s not that at all, and the acrid taste of poi­son sud­den­ly hits the palette. For issue 104 of LWLies, ded­i­cat­ed to and inspired by Blink Twice, we sought the inim­itable skills of Leeds-based illus­tra­tor Sarah Mad­den to take on a por­trait of the film’s star, Nao­mi Ack­ie, who stars as unwit­ting food ser­vice work­er Fri­da who is sud­den­ly swept off her feet by bil­lion­aire tech mag­nate Slater King (Chan­ning Tatum) and whisked off to his pri­vate island in the sun. 

LWLies: Paint us a pic­ture of your work space. Do you feel it’s per­fect, or do you have plans to enhance it?

Mad­den: I’m lucky to be able to work from home. My work­space is small, but it fits all of my essen­tials, plus plants. The best part is the view; my office over­looks the canal, so I get to watch the boats and dog walk­ers pass by through­out the day. It’s love­ly, but it can be a lit­tle dis­tract­ing at times! I’ve recent­ly revamped my work­space, so I am real­ly hap­py and com­fort­able with it now. I spend a lot of time there, so it’s impor­tant to make it an ergonom­ic space with the right bal­ance of prac­ti­cal­i­ty and cosiness.

What’s the first prac­ti­cal thing you did for this LWLies cov­er commission?

I always read through the brief again before jump­ing in. I want to make sure I under­stand every­thing and have an accu­rate sense of what you want from me. This ini­tial stage is most­ly research, so I watched the trail­er a lot, read the film syn­op­sis, and gath­ered images of the film (posters, stills etc). I want to get a feel for the film’s art direc­tion and find details I can incor­po­rate into my work, like the recur­ring red flow­ers. Since it’s a new film, view­ers may not be ful­ly famil­iar with its visu­al lan­guage. So, it’s impor­tant to con­sid­er the ref­er­ences they have encoun­tered, incor­po­rate these ele­ments into your work, and intro­duce some­thing fresh and original.

LWLies cov­ers always con­tain por­traits – what’s your approach for draw­ing peo­ple / likeness?

I gath­er a lot of ref­er­ence mate­r­i­al to recre­ate the subject’s face for the piece I’m doing. For this piece, I looked for ref­er­ences of her face at the angle I want­ed. I also watched inter­views to see how her face moved as she smiled. Once I’m more famil­iar with the face, I feel more con­fi­dent to get a like­ness. I will tweak a lot as I go think­ing, ​‘her eyes are rounder than that,’ or ​‘her nose should crease more here’. It isn’t always about being tech­ni­cal­ly accu­rate but cap­tur­ing unique moments on someone’s face.

What were the chal­lenges of get­ting Nao­mi Ackie’s por­trait just right? 

It can be tough to do a por­trait of an actor as their char­ac­ter. You want to ensure that peo­ple know what they’re look­ing at. For exam­ple, this is tech­ni­cal­ly a por­trait of Fri­da (Naomi’s char­ac­ter). The main chal­lenge was get­ting the bal­ance of Nao­mi and Fri­da. Nao­mi looks so dif­fer­ent in every film I see her in and of course, she looks com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent as her­self in inter­views or on the red car­pet. I can’t rely on famil­iar fea­tures like her long state­ment hair here.

For this cov­er, tell us how you worked with the colours and the lay­er­ing to achieve such a vibrant effect?

Ini­tial­ly, I thought the colours could be dark­er to con­trast with Naomi’s bright smile and con­tin­ue the sun­ny-to-sin­is­ter nar­ra­tive. But as the film is set on a sun­ny island, we went with brighter colours. I enjoy rich colours and adding moments of con­trast in my palettes. The cov­er shows Fri­da with a false sense of secu­ri­ty. To depict that Fri­da is unaware or unsure of the threats sur­round­ing her, I use a mix of full-colour and linework when illus­trat­ing the snakes. I felt that the yel­low was strong enough to grab atten­tion in full-colour and was sub­tle enough to almost miss in line-work.

Is there some­one you’ll show your ear­ly drafts to for instant, hon­est feedback?

I have friends that are design­ers and illus­tra­tors and I will show them work some­times for feed­back or a sec­ond opin­ion. I can get con­sumed in small details if I’ve been work­ing on one thing for a while, so I find it real­ly help­ful to take a step back. I also ask for my partner’s opin­ion a lot. He’s not in the cre­ative indus­try but I find his opin­ion equal­ly impor­tant and usu­al­ly the most eye-open­ing. I think cre­atives can get car­ried away in our tech­ni­cal knowl­edge and can miss some obvi­ous points.

How do you know when one of your art­works is finished?

I guess it’s nev­er real­ly done. You can tweak and tweak. I some­times look at work that I did years ago and feel tempt­ed to revis­it and ​’make bet­ter’. I’m a bit of a per­fec­tion­ist so I have to set­tle for ​‘it’s good enough now’. Also, a client’s dead­line is also very help­ful for deter­min­ing when art­work is fin­ished, haha.

How can our read­ers sup­port you and fol­low your work? 

You can fol­low me on my Insta­gram @hello.sola. I also have a newslet­ter you can sign up for on my web­site sarah​mad​den​.co​.uk. The newslet­ters are very infre­quent, but I’ll try to pop up with some­thing inter­est­ing a cou­ple of times a year.

LWLies 104: The Blink Twice issue is avail­able now